BEIRUT: One of today's most pressing issues is the crisis relations between the United States and the Arab world. For Arab countries, the question has long been how to redress the balance in power relations between them and the US and improve the representation of Arabs in the West.

During the last 20 years, there has been a vast amount of academic and theoretical work relating to this subject, particularly in the areas of literature and cultural studies.

Post-colonial theories examine the discourses and representations that are present at every level of Western art, history and culture, which reveal and perpetuate the imbalance in power relations between Western nations and the decolonized Third World.

At a lecture at the American University of Beirut recently, visiting Americans academic Allen Hibbard, professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, discussed the novels of American writer Paul Bowles in relation to the work of Palestinian-American writer and academic Edward Said and in light of contemporary relations between the US and the Middle East.

Said famously used the term Orientalism to designate what he identified as Western cultural representations and discourses about the "Orient", or Middle East, which are ultimately ideological and allow the West to exert political control over the Middle East.

Paul Bowles, an American exile who lived in Morocco for most of his life, was the author of several pieces, translations of Moroccan literature, and autobiography and four novels including "The Sheltering Sky", "Let it Come Down" and "Spider's House".

Hibbard pointed out that both Bowles and Said were exiles and true cosmopolitans: the former left America in early adulthood and lived in Tangiers until his death in 1999.

The later made the reverse journey, leaving the Middle East for America. Bowles chose his exile, like many American artists during the first half of the 20th century, such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James and James Baldwin, who left America for Europe and used their new environments for artistic purposes. Said, however, was an exile due to political circumstances beyond his control.

Habbard asserted that Bowles' early work, when read in relations to Said's theories, was clearly "Orientalist". His novels are mostly set in Morocco and are concerned with the encounter between foreign visitors and the locals. The Arab characters are partially developed and the Western characters' response to them enables actors to understand each other.

Hibbard's lecture ended on an ambiguous note regarding the future of American-Arab relations. In the discussions following the lecture, it was suggested that "Orientalism" may be a term that is too all-encompassing and may not be applicable to the complexity of Bowles' later work.

It was also recommended that a fair study of Bowles' writing should have included greater examination of his reception by Moroccan writers such as Mohammad Shukri.